Simon Pegg Turned To Two Diehard Fans For Help Writing Star Trek Beyond
At the beginning of director Justin Lin's 2016 film "Star Trek Beyond," Uhura (Zoe Saldaña) ends her romantic relationship with Spock (Zachary Quinto), leaving him bitter and despondent in his uniquely Vulcan way. As part of their breakup, Uhura attempts to return a necklace to Spock, but he refuses it. Although it belonged to his mother, he insists that Uhura keep it. As it happens, the necklace is made of a rare mineral called Vokaya, a turquoise-like stone only found on the Vulcan homeworld and harmlessly radioactive. Later in the film, the radiation from the Vokaya necklace will allow Spock to locate Uhura on a distant planet after the two had been separated in a starship crash.
"Star Trek Beyond" was written by Doug Jung and by Simon Pegg, who also played Scotty in the film. Pegg has long been a pop culture obsessive and has written a TV series ("Spaced") and a book ("Nerd Do Well") about his various obsessions. Although a "Star Wars" fan first and foremost, Pegg was more than passingly familiar with "Star Trek," and Importantly, conversant in the franchise. He also understood that anything he wrote into his film was going be meticulously recorded by Trekkies everywhere as an official part of the franchise's extant canon. "Beyond" took place in its own parallel continuity, of course, but Pegg seemingly wanted to play fairly with certain details and premises.
When it came to that Vokaya necklace, however, Pegg required some aid. Luckily, he was able to contact Dan Carlson and Harry Doddema, the founders of Memory Alpha. Named after the massive in-universe "Star Trek" library, Memory Alpha is the largest online fan wiki yet constructed for all things "Star Trek."
Speaking to Collider in 2016, Pegg said he asked Carlson and Doddema to name Vokaya.
Let's have a talk, nerd to nerd
Pegg clearly knew where to find his fellow nerds and he recalled getting a swift, ultra-nerdy response from Carlson and Doddema when he made an obscure request:
"We actually went out to the Memory Alpha guys, the two founders of the Memory Alpha wiki and asked them to name something for us. There's a specific thing in the screenplay that we wanted to get a name for, and so I just wrote out an email that said, 'Hey guys, there's this thing, and I can't tell you what it's for, but there's this item,; and three hours later I got a full etymological breakdown of the word and the history of the thing. So they're going to be in the credits, thanked, for that."
The "thing" turned out to be the Vokaya necklace, which Carlson confirmed in a 2016 TrekCore article. "What he was looking for," Carlson wrote, "was a Vulcan mineral with some unique properties: a stone or gem used in jewelry, which transmits a harmless energy field that could be detected by a scan, and was uniquely identifiable to Vulcan." Pegg may have known the general thrust of "Star Trek," but wasn't the kind of nerd who could crack out facts about obscure Vulcan minerals. Perhaps, Pegg hoped, there was something already within "Star Trek" canon that he could pull from, and he called known experts.
It seems there was no obscure Vulcan mineral that Pegg could employ, but Calrson and Doddema knew enough of the Vulcan language to come up with something themselves. Carlson recalled how excited he and Doddema were to actually work on a real "Star Trek" project, and they began to suss out exactly what kind of Vulcan stone could be used.
Vokaya etymology
Carlson continued:
"For the next few hours we furiously emailed back and forth, pitching ideas. Harry thought of 'trininite,' a real-world radioactive mineral created during the Trinity atomic bomb test that was briefly used in jewelry (before the consequences of radioactivity were fully understood)."
Carlson explained that Vulcans (as all Trekkies know) were a violent and warlike species many millennia ago, and had even fought vicious nuclear wars. Vulcans turned to logic as a societal ethos after the teachings to Surak took hold, and they have been peaceful ever since. The use of a radioactive stone in Vulcan lapidary, then, would logically serve as a cautious reminder of their violent past. "As a physical relic of Vulcan's illogical wars," Carlson wrote, "it would hold deep meaning for them, justifying its use as a memento in jewelry and similar artifacts." But then the issue of what to name this stone arose.
In the "Star Trek: Enterprise" episode "The Forge" (November 19, 2004), the Vulcan word for "remember" was spoken as "vokau." In Diane Duane's 1988 novel "Spock's World," the Vulcan word for "mountain" was said to be "heya." Carlson and Doddema merely combined those words. Carlson wrote:
"We tried a few different variations, but the translation was always meant to roughly be 'remembrance stone' or 'memory stone.' I suggested vokau-heya as a tip of the hat to other hyphenated Vulcan words (like koon-ut-kal-if-fee), and we eventually shortened it to vokaya."
"Koon-ut-kal-if-fee," spoken in "Amok Time" (September 15, 1967), is a Vulcan marriage ritual (as, again, most Trekkies are no doubt aware). As for Vokaya, it now has its own entry on Memory Alpha, which includes the story of how Carlson and Doddema helped name it.